Representing a remarkable
step forward in digital filmmaking, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is a
stop-motion animated feature film created through the innovative use of
editing and camera technology. Based on a 19th century Russian folktale of a
groom (voiced by Johnny Depp) who marries a zombie (Helena Bonham Carter) by
mistake, this groundbreaking work features puppets made from stainless steel
armatures covered by a silicon skin. Corpse Bride is co-directed by Burton
and stop-motion animation veteran Mike Johnson and is scheduled for release
September 23 by Warner Bros..

Technologically, this is a
movie of many firsts; it’s the first feature-length, stop-motion film
edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it’s the first feature shot
using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most
significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film
cameras based on the criterion of image quality.

Editing
Stop-Motion Animation with Final Cut Pro

Corpse Bride is Jonathan
Lucas’ first feature as a full-fledged editor. A Guild member since
1993, Lucas has worked as an assistant on more than 20 live action movies,
including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 101 Dalmatians and
Sommersby. It was his work as first assistant editor on last years’
Troy for Warners that brought Lucas to the attention of Corpse Bride producer
Allison Abbate. At press time, he was still editing the film at Three Mills
Studios in the Bromley by Bow section of London, England, where the
production also took place.

“ A lot of folks think
our footage is CGI,” says Lucas. “It’s so smooth it looks
computer-generated. The Canon still cameras are amazing; the quality is
pretty unbelievable. If I have to, I can blow it up by 30 to 40 percent
without showing degradation.” The immediacy of digital technology
speeds the editing process. “I’m editing new footage three hours
later, maybe quicker,” says Lucas. “It’s almost instant
gratification.” As footage is edited, it replaces storyboard images and
slowly the movie gets built.

The preparation process for
stop-motion is immense. “Shooting is monumental,” says Lucas.
“As an editor you are a lot more patient.” He points out that an
action film can have 14,000 feet of dailies per day––on Harry
Potter 2 he had some days with 20,000 feet of dailies. That film, a shoot
with children and animals, consumed over a million feet of film.

“ Most features shoot
in 12 to 14 weeks,” notes Lucas. “With Corpse Bride it’s 52
weeks! We only get two minutes of film a week with stop-motion. One shot can
take three weeks. Even so, I’m still refining the story on a daily
basis with co-director Mike Johnson.” (Unlike on Frank Miller’s
Sin City, the rules of the Directors Guild of America don’t prohibit
co-directors on animation.)

It isn’t just the
amount of time on the set that’s different about stop-motion
production. “The animation process is almost reversed over a live
action movie,” explains Lucas. “The storyboards are all JPEG
images, and they shoot almost to the frame what’s on the storyboards.
At one point, we had five or six storyboard artists working ten hours a day,
six days a week. Do they play it in a close shot? A wide shot? It’s
fine-tuned for months on end until the director says he’s
happy.”

Audio for stop-motion is
fine-tuned, too. “I lay in the voice record and sound effects
earlier,” says Lucas. “Composer Danny Elfman does all the music
for Tim Burton, and I use a lot of his music for the temp track. It’s a
pretty good soundtrack before it’s handed off.” Sound
DeLuxe–– which also worked on Burton’s upcoming live-action
film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory––then adds footsteps
(there are a lot in this movie), ADR and alternative sound effects for Burton
to choose while Elfman records new music.

“For editing stop-frame
animation, Final Cut Pro definitely works,” says Lucas.
“It’s fairly friendly with the high-def footage I have.” A
longtime Avid editor, Lucas is using FCP for the first time on Corpse Bride.
“We inherited the edit system from a previous film crew,” he
reveals. “I was thrown into the deep end to learn Final Cut Pro during
production. It took me two weeks to master.

“ Final Cut Pro is more
editor-friendly in some ways than Avid,” he continues. “You can
extend a shot without going into trim mode. With Avid, you always had to
think what tracks to push down.” Lucas used FCP simply as an editing
tool. Digital Intermediate (DI) was exchanged with London’s Moving
Picture Company for the hundreds of effects shots in the movie.
While Final Cut Pro can be easier to use and is much less expensive, being a
pioneer with it in stop-motion presents some challenges. “We have an
awful lot of JPEG storyboards––sometimes up to 12 soundtracks and
more than six layers of video,” says Lucas. “I auto-save a
lot.”

First assistant Ralph Foster
explains that having so many JPEG still frames seems to challenge the system.
That demand is unique to stop-motion production. Adding more RAM didn’t
help, so to cut down on JPEG overhead, they were converted into
QuickTime.

Lucas is running an Apple G5
(dual-2GHz) and FCP 4.5. Although version 5 and Mac OS X Tiger became
available during production, there was no switch midstream because of the
risk that it might break something in the production’s custom pipeline
based on Final Cut Pro 4.5.
Final Cut Pro generates XML data of shot information. XML data, which is just
specially formatted text, is much easier to integrate into animation
pipelines. For Corpse Bride, data wrangler/computer programmer Martin
Pengelly-Phillips wrote a utility in Python computer language to
convert the XML data into a flattened reel. The shots get validated for
naming and length, and checked against the list of known shots in the
editorial database in FileMaker Pro. In Python, a series of AppleScripts are
created to update the editorial database with the most recent
cut.

The FCP project is 80 minutes
long at 720 x 480 (offline) and 23.98 fps (for easier NTSC pull-down). Every
shot is a folder of images, and each clip is treated as a reel. The EDL is
eventually exported in CMX format for 2K conform on Quantel IQ, then output
to film on Arri Laser.

After doing [the 1993 Oscar-nominated
stop-motion animated feature] The Nightmare Before Christmas, I was
looking for something else to do in the same medium, because I love the
stop-motion medium. A friend of mine gave me a little short story, a
couple of paragraphs from an old folk tale. It captured my attention
and seemed right for this particular type of animation. It’s such
a special medium. It’s like casting––you like to
marry the medium with the material. And this seemed like a good
match.

I’ve always loved stop-motion
animation. What’s nice about it is that it’s so tactile.
Our Corpse Bride puppets are beautifully made and our animators are
amazing. There’s something wonderful about being able to
physically touch and move the characters, and to see their world
actually exist. It’s similar to making a live action film; if
you’re doing it all on blue screen, it doesn’t give you the
feeling of actually being there, which the stop-motion process
does.

My love for stop-motion started with
[film animation pioneer] Ray Harryhausen. One of the beautiful things
about Harryhausen’s work is that no matter what it is that he was
doing––a monster, a low-budget science fiction
film––you always felt there was an artist at work behind
it; you always felt someone’s personality. It’s like
bringing an inanimate object to life. It’s moving a
three-dimensional object frame by frame, and you think, “Wow,
there’s something really beautiful and old-fashioned, hand-made
and artistic about that.” To me, there’s something very
special about that.

You can do
beautiful work on a computer and you can do beautiful hand-drawn
animation. All of it has its own quality. But there’s just
something special to me about the stop-motion medium.

Tim Burton

Shooting with
Canon SLR Cameras and Nikon Lenses

Corpse Bride has a surprising
choice of camera for feature cinematography–– the Canon EOS-1D
Mark II––a commercial digital SLR camera designed for still
photography. This is a tremendous change in the state-of-the-art from five
years ago, when Aardman Animations used custom-built film camera heads based
on converted Mitchell cameras for the animated feature Chicken Run. The
ancient Mitchells were chosen because the pin registration system was more
accurate than any modern motion picture film camera. Finding that same sort
of repeatable, rock-solid precision in digital SLR cameras would be a
challenge.

While in London working on
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, effects consultant Chris Watts
happened to have dinner with Warner Bros. visual effects senior vice
president Chris deFaria and Corpse Bride producer Abbate. “While
discussing Corpse Bride, for some reason, I just assumed it was
being shot with digital still cameras,” says Watts. “Chris
deFaria is an accomplished photographer and saw the possibilities
immediately.” Director of Photography Pete Kozachik and his team had
been considering digital acquisition, but not with off-the-shelf SLR cameras
as Watts proposed. With the beginning of photography only a month away,
digital SLR camera testing began. There were many unknowns:

• Are images from a
digital still camera consistent frame to frame?
• Is the quality comparable to film?
• Is the image quality stable under different thermal and
humidity conditions?
• Could a system be devised for previewing animations on set?
• Could a system be devised to keep track of all the frames?
• Could a live video tap be created for a digital still
camera?

With these issues in mind,
Watts set about getting his hands on every digital camera he could find.
Canon UK loaned a 10D, a 1D, a 1D Mark 2, and a 1DS. Nikon loaned a D1x,
a D100, and one of the new D2H cameras. Watts also tested cameras from
Sigma and Kodak. Initial tests were held at Framestore-CFC and the
Moving Picture Company in London.

“ We shot the same
scene on every camera, converted the digital frames using dcRAW [an
open-source program that accesses raw digital images], crunched everything to
2K, color-timed the sequences to match using Baselight and then output
to film,” says Watts. “Basically, everything looked great until
the film-originated version came up, then everyone yelled at the
projectionist, ‘Focus!’” The images from digital cameras
looked so stunning when projected. The tests convinced Burton, Johnson,
Abbate and executives at Warners.

“ We originally
selected the Nikon D2H because of the wireless ftp, the chip size, and the
fact that we owned $90,000 of Nikon glass [lenses],” notes Watts.
However, random noise was visible as pixilation in dark areas when the shots
were played back as a movie. This pixilation effect was only visible in
stop-motion photography, an application the Nikon hadn’t been designed
for.

The Canon EOS-1D Mark II,
which uses a CMOS sensor and DIGIC II processor chip, was one of the most
expensive still cameras tested, but the image quality was amazing, according
to Watts. A way had to be found to mount Nikon lenses on the Canon EOS body.
With the NEOS adapter, focus and aperture must be set manually, but
that’s fine for stop-motion photography.

Although some digital SLR
cameras have “video out” ports, by its nature, no SLR shows any
video until an exposure is made. A priority was to create a live tap so
animators could see what they were doing. DP Kozachik, Watts and chief motion
control technician Andy Bowman designed a rig that would allow a small
video camera to be mounted on the back of the still camera body, but
slide out of the way for fine focus adjustments.

The production bought 24 of
the Canons. The original plan for lighting stations was to have a full
system at each of the 24 sets, but that was cost-prohibitive. Seven
lighting crews shared one station on a mobile cart. Each cart included a
Macintosh, Photoshop and a suite of JavaScript, AppleScript and
QuickTime tools to enable the lighting crews to view their work as it
was developing.

The
Corpse Bride puppets are made from stainless steel armatures covered by
a silicon skin.

FilmLight built software to
take a raw file from a digital camera and output a Cineon file with the look
of 5248 film stock. Production software incorporated dcRAW and
Truelight’s proprietary color transforms. The software took care of
resizing and annotation by generating code that directed Apple Shake to
produce QuickTime files for editorial and 2K DPX sequences to match the color
profile of 5248 film scans. Although the Canon would shoot 4k, the images
were wrangled at 2k (2048 x 1365) because that would be the final output with
the Arri Laser.

For projection playback,
Iridas Frame-Cycler, was run on a Boxx PC. In the Iridas software, 1.85
masking was applied as well as simple color adjustments (printer lights,
saturation, contrast and gamma) without disturbing the basic calibration.
FilmLight designed a proprietary 3-D color cube for the digital projector
that would convert the raw files on the fly to appear as if they had been
shot on 5248.

Conclusion

Corpse Bride, along with
films like Sin City, lead a trend in using emerging digital technology in
ways not intended for feature filmmaking. Whether using gear designed for
digital still photography or for HDTV, the visual results are
striking.

Digital filmmaking has long
been considered a trade-off compared to 35mm filmmaking; digital was cheaper
or could do things impossible with film, but at a cost to overall image
quality. With Corpse Bride, this is no longer the case.

Robin Rowe is a freelance
writer and a partner in MovieEditor.com; he also leads LinuxMovies.org,
CinePaint.org and ScreenplayLab.com